Category Archives: thought - Page 23

accountability

Posted by on August 10, 2009 No comments

Accountability is a tough nut to crack. It can be a powerful tool when employed to get something done, but creating the right circumstances for it is difficult. Moreso when one is creating in a solo environment with no external pressures keeping deadlines in tact and work moving forward. It’s one of the larger pitfalls of functioning independently. It might also be one of the benefits.

What I mean is, when I want to accomplish something I need to find a mechanism for motivating myself when I’m exhausted. Having a family and a fulltime job can really take the wind out of my sails and make noodling around on the endless expanse of the internet more attractive than settling in to record something. One of the better motivators for me in recent memory was my commitment to post a new sketch, not a finished product, every Thursday. I stuck to that and it worked for quite a while. Well, until I was beaten down by a massive heat wave in June. That coupled with air conditioning failures more or less derailed most of my non-survival related activities. But my Thursday posts were something that I used to keep myself honest and they were a great idea. Yay me.

The only detractor to my weekly post was the lack of specificity. I had to post “something.” It didn’t have to be coherent or move any of my larger projects along, it simply had to exist. From a certain point of view that’s plenty good enough but if there is a larger goal in mind (like an album or collection or large scale work) I might have actually lost ground while appearing to make progress. The head games are all very tricky.

So why not simply lay out my end game and mark progress toward it? A lot of reasearch types have indicated that in some cases talking about something gives people the same charge as having done it. It’s like having the idea is enough and once we’ve communicated it the execution becomes unnecessary. I know I have allowed myself to fall into that more than once. My old journals are littered with references to projects that never went anywhere.

If telling someone about something makes me less likely to do it and doesn’t necessarily add any accountability then how does this work? Like everything else in life it comes down to personal discipline. The only person who can really hold me accountable is me. I’m really the only one who cares if I ever write another lick of music. I’m the only one who cares if it’s any good. The rest of the world would be perfectly happy to have me trot along with the other things I’m doing and could not care less about my urge to compose or record.

Accountability is about the person doing the work. It’s about me.

This stuff always sounds painfully hokey and I would ignore it if it weren’t completely true. But it is. My next trick is to come up with a way to make it work for me. Find a way to strike that balance and use the world around me to keep me moving while it’s trying to get in my way. There’s a hack in there somewhere and I will find it.

If anyone is listening, do you have any clues?

a little looking back

Posted by on August 6, 2009 No comments

I started writing something about a new composition. My focus when things got rolling was on whether or not one would compose differently for a live orchestra as opposed to a virtual one. What got me going was a particularly delicate harp passage that sounded lovely in the virtual world of Logic but that would never work in a live setting without amplification and other technilogical assistance. The path got a little blurry after a while because it became apparent that I didn’t really care if I was writing for the computer or for people, what I was really doing was trying to talk myself out of composing for the orchestra altogether.

That feeling goes back a long way. About 15 years or so. For me, that’s quite a while. There was nothing I loved more than composing for the orchestra. There is somethiing about taking on an ensemble of such magnitude. The are so many possibilities. It’s a playground and if one is particularly inventive there are so few real limitations. There is also a side to it that is like a puzzle. Some ideas are better suited to certain implementations. What solutions can be divined that bring out a given sonority or melody is engaging and addictive. It’s fun.

When I think back on it, I clearly see myself in a practice room well after midnight on a Saturday. The conservatory building was officially closed but those few of us who worked on the custodial staff during the summer knew some things. I sat there in front of a freshly tuned baby grand piano with my notebooks and pens (never pencils! Erasers are for the weak and kill ideas!) with only the vile yellow sodium lights pouring in from the streets to light the room. The sound of the room. The stench of the steam heat. And the absolute focus I was able to summon. There was nothing else in the world. Only those tones coming from the piano and the scratching of pen on paper. My responsibilities were limited to that page and passage. The importance assigned to each stroke of the pen was incredible. It’s horribly naive and pretentious in hindsight, yet the attraction is so obvious to me even today.

Why did I stop? Why did I move on? Was it the fact that after my time as a big fish in a small pond I couldn’t face the reality that I would likely never have a work performed again? Did it have to do with the misguided notion that the orchestra is a creature of the past, a museum for the culture that was? Or was it simple creative wanderlust? That desire to try something new and forge ahead in search of uncharted ground.

In truth, it’s probably a little of each. As I sit and listen to the pristine but mechanical performance of my latest piece as rendered by sampled instruments, I’m struck that I can still imagine how it would sound live. Alive. It moves me to find that after so many years I still feel an affiliation with that art form. The ideas trickle out and they aren’t bad. They stink of unedited inspiration because that’s what they are. And that is how they shall stay.

Maybe I will copy out the score in long hand. An homage to a discipline I have not practiced in some time. An act of love for something that I never really left behind. A gift from that stubborn and pretentious young man in the halflight of a winter evening.

what is othertime?

Posted by on August 4, 2009 No comments

When I registered this domain a million years ago, it was to build a community site for some friends of mine. I knew a lot of people at the turn of the century (been waiting forever to use that one!) who were recently coming out of the academy and into the world beyond. They were artist, musicians, writers, and poets who now faced up to the reality that the world at large doesn’t much care for individual creations in a financial way. That is to say, we were all starting to choke down day jobs.

Throughout my academic career I took it as a given that I would end up teaching at a university. The sheer dollar value of my student loan debt and a few decisions that decidedly limited my options took me down a different path. I quickly realized that pursuing an academic position wasn’t really for me. I would be doing a lot of things that I didn’t much care for in the hopes that I would have time and support for my creative work. Those ideas carried me to the end of my PhD coursework and no further. I left dreams (and nightmares) of the academy behind and did something else.

What is that something else? It’s outside of the scope of this blog. I don’t talk about my job here for many reasons, not the least of which being that this site and the work that I do that is associated with it has nothing to do with my day job. In the Venn diagram of life they don’t produce any intersections. Nuff said.

The community that I hoped to establish fell to the wayside. People found out that day jobs become careers and the old definitions that one has of oneself sometimes fall away and are replaced. The painter becomes an illustrator. The writer becomes a grant specialist. The musician becomes a system administrator. It happens. People change.

For a while the site was a place I would put up all kinds of links and documentation about Free Software for making music. I had some good links and some good HowTos but as I slowly moved away from that way of doing things, I let it drop. I would rather use software to make music than spend my days tinkering with software for its own sake. I still find it amusing to geek out about this or that, but it’s not central to how I spend my time.

From that, I turned this into a blog solely about my music and what I’m producing. It’s going to stay that way for a long time, but I want to add in whatever I can find about the life of those of us who clung to our disciplines in the face of the day job. Those who couldn’t put down the pen or the guitar. People who create in their other time. Subtle, eh?

Here and now I’m a composer and a musician. That’s what this site is all about.

a fascinating experiment

Posted by on July 30, 2009 1 comment

Occasionally there’s a story on one of the podcasts that I track that kicks off a train of thought that is truly enjoyable. Many times it’s something silly that I find academically amusing and it passes the time on my bike or driving home from work. Yesterday was one of those and it’s something that might have a little more meat than I initially thought.

First, a bit about my podcast habit. I go in cycles with them and if I get interrupted by an audio book it can be months before I get around to the backlog. With that in mind, the podcast in question was a Studio 360 podcast from April 17, 2009 that pulled me in. The story is pretty simple and you’ll get much more by listening to it in its entirety, but here are the important bits as I see it: Sufjan Stevens had a contest. The winner got an unreleased song. Not just a recording of it, but the distribution rights. The whole enchilada. The winner was a guy about my age in Brooklyn and he decided that rather than tossing an mp3 out onto the Internet, he would invite people over for tea to listen to it in person. A little listening party in an intimate setting for this lonely song.

Full disclosure: I’m not a Sufjan Stevens fan. I wouldn’t be able to name one of his songs and probably wouldn’t recognize one if I heard it. But I have tried applying this scenario to artists whom I appreciate deeply and I’m pretty sure I get it.

In the story it is mentioned that many fans are upset by this and much is made of the digital divide and the age of said fans. The implication is that people in their 20s feel entitled to all things that can be copied digitally and people in their 30s don’t. I don’t find much to pick through in that argument. Overgeneralizing about generations is best left to those pathetic baby boomers still listening to Springsteen in their midlife crisis sports cars. What was I saying? Generations. Right!

Where I find something of value is in the push and pull between can and should and must. The implication of the fans who haven’t heard the song (because let’s just say they don’t live in New York) is that because something is so easily duplicated and distributed that it should be made available. But why? When U2 or Sufjan Stevens put a song on the iTunes store, it’s to get paid. They could give away their music a la Nine Inch Nails and so many others, but instead people are happy to click and drop a dollar in the cup for their song. What would the argument be if the winner of the contest sold copies of the song? Would that be seen as a slap in the face to the artist? Would people scream out about it? Owning a recording is such a tricky thing and this scenario is not so simple as to be about turning a buck.

And what of that ownership? Do we chafe at it because it’s an item that requires almost no effort to reproduce and distribute? Is there something inherent in a recording that suggests that can leads to should and on to must? I shrug off the notion that this is a beautiful and unique snowflake of a recording that everyone must hear. Wonderful performances happen every day that are lost to the air. Plenty of brilliant work is lost at the bottom of a library of mp3s never to be heard again by the person who purchased them. I also have to reject the idea that because this format is easier to copy than a painting that it should be copied. These are all fun ideas to chase.

Yet, none of those threads have brought me nearly the entertainment of trying to puzzle out what Mr. Stevens intended. He wrote and recorded a song as he has done many times (I presume). Then he gave it away. But not to the world. He gave the power of distribution to one person. I wonder if he is amused by the outcome. If it causes any small amount of angst on his part, the gnashing of teeth in his forums. It strikes me that the real art here is the performance of the fans as they struggle to get their hands on a artificially scarce piece of art and the acts of those who posess it and dole it out with such intimate delicacy. I can’t imagine that Mr. Stevens would have predicted this particular outcome. Perhaps that is the beauty of it. He didn’t know what was going to happen and something that I would call truly surprising did. It’s out of the best case scenario section of the John Cage handbook.

If I were a real blogger, I would ask my non-existent audience to discuss what they think about the rights of fans in the digital age or some other straw man to improve the ad revenue that I don’t have. Instead, I will offer that Mr. Stevens has started quite a game. He has produced an act of art the point of which will be missed by most of those who play a part in it. There are no implications about ownership here. There’s no new territory about “P2P” or “DRM” or “BuzzAcronymOfTheWeek.” I think it’s more subtle. And perhaps I’m missing it myself, but it’s fun to think about at the very least. I would have to call this creative act a success.

money and creative work

Posted by on July 28, 2009 No comments

My good buddy Kevin and I had an email exchange the other day about music and money. Specifically, it was about how much he felt his band should charge for their CD versus what another member thought. One wanted to charge $10 and the other felt more like charging something far less or even giving them away. There was talk of Trent Reznor and his new approach with NIN and how that might not be applicable to independent musicians with a following in the tens rather than tens of thousands. As I wrote down my take, a distinct difference in approaches to musical work and compensation began to emerge.

Conservatory training for composers is full of enlightment inducing thought bombs. Some of them are placed by brilliant teachers and they tick away for years before going off at just the right time. This wisdom is sad in a sense because the one who receives it will most likely appreciate on the same day that he needed it to avoid a catastrophe that unfolded one minute or less before the bomb went off. Thus do we learn the things we already know.

All of that is to say that when studying composition the overriding theme in most of the great composers of the canon is that they worked very hard with little appreciation and came to acclaim after death. And not on the same day that the obituary was published. It was usually 60 to 100 years later. It’s not a pleasant lesson for someone who is 18 and just now taking on the seemingly austere mantle of composer, but it’s one that does serve.

That lesson taught me about the importance of the day job. It taught me that creative work doesn’t lead to money 99 times out of 100. Somehow this piece of knowledge that etched itself into me brought with it a profound joy for any time someone listened to my work and made even the most dismissive of comments. At least I owned that moment in that mind. And if I don’t get paid for my creative work it doesn’t really matter. I know in my heart that I make music out of a compulsion, not out of some misguided sense of industry. It’s something that is motivated purely from within.

I think that it would be very nice to cultivate an audience of perhaps 100 people who really enjoy and appreciate my work. It would give me the confidence that every artist needs and the feedback that is essential to any creative work. I’m sure there are ways to create some kind of profit from such a group, but again money isn’t my intent. The intent is to be heard. And the more time I spend thinking about it, the more central intent is to my work.

Kevin is an incredibly talented man. To my mind, whatever decision he makes will be right. We’re living in a time where creative people can’t really lose. Anyone can have an audience with a little work and some word of mouth. Not everyone can make a living at it, but it doesn’t seem that the number of people who can has gone down.